Richard Serra and Architecture in Art

Architecture is made up of geographies and gestures that, apparently in a simple way, modify the landscape and make it a place. Richard Serra (San Francisco, 1939) is an artist who in 1970, commissioned by the collector Roger Davidson, created the work Shift in the middle of Ontario, thirty kilometres north of Toronto.

Shift is what we call a land art installation, one of the expressions of visual art that comes closest to the truest and purest architecture, thanks to its close link with the landscape. Specifically, the work consists of six large concrete slabs arranged in a zigzag pattern, marking, from beginning to end, the exact distance a body can travel without being lost sight of by the person at the other end of the installation.

Richard Serra’s work Shift brings a sense of the geography of architecture with a gesture that can be traced back to musical, cinematographic, artistic and literary minimalism.